The invention relates to a method for the emergency supply of oxygen in an aircraft, as well as to an emergency oxygen supply apparatus for carrying out this method.
After an incident of decompression on board a passenger aircraft, it is common, for reasons of safety, to descend the aircraft to an altitude which permits breathing without additional oxygen supply. The distance to the destination airport or the alternative airport may be considerable, depending on the flight path and the location of the incident of decompression, so that the reduced flight altitude leads to significantly higher fuel consumption. A reserve fuel supply must be carried along on board the aircraft for this reason, which entails a correspondingly large weight load and reduction of the payload capacity of the aircraft caused by this.
For this reason, in the case of decompression, one strives to descend only to an altitude which is acceptable with regard to the additional fuel consumption, and to supply the passengers with additional oxygen via passenger oxygen masks during the remaining flight duration. Until now, the disadvantage of this procedure has been the fact that the additional oxygen provided in aircraft for a possible emergency oxygen supply, as a rule, must be carried along in high-pressure containers or chemical oxygen generators. The storage capacity of these oxygen storage devices is relatively low and also may not be significantly increased on account of the limited space available in aircraft.